Friday, November 18, 2011

Office Web Apps and iOS, now working

I wrote a post a few weeks ago highlighting the fact that Office Web Apps (the ability to view and edit Office documents in a browser) on Office 365 still wasn’t working with the upgrade to iOS 5.0. I was interested to find out yesterday that it is now in fact working.

So what changed? Well, I have upgraded to iOS 5.01 but don’t think that was what resolved the issue. The reason is that at the same I last tested Office Web Apps on iOS 5.0 I also tested it on Android 3.2.1 and got similar problems. Now however, it seems to work on both platforms. This to me indicates that the backend has been changed. Thus, it seems we’ve had an update on Office 365 which is great news.

Things are certainly much better but they are far from prefect. In my testing on both iOS and Android I have found Office Web Apps on Office 365 to be very fragile. I still get plenty of browser crashes, document lock up and text ending up in unexpected places. This is totally understandable considering the complexity of Office Web Apps but it indicates that there is some work to be done to ensure stability on mobile platforms.

Importantly I can now report to users that Office Web Apps on Office 365 does work in edit mode, which it never used to, but in my testing so far it is still a little fragile.